Slashdot Mirror

The hydrocarbon's use as a fuel is ended. As a fuel, it is destroyed. I mention that because the thread was not distinguishing between renewal and recycling.

"Stellar nucleosynthesis, quiescent or explosive, forge the whole variety of nuclei from C to U but LiBeB nuclei are destroyed in the interior of stars, except 7Li which is produced in AGB and novae. The destruction temperatures are 2, 2.5, 3.5, 5.3 and 5 millions of degrees for 6Li, 7Li, 9Be, 10B and 11B respectively. It is worth noting that 7Li and 11B could be produced by neutrino spallation in helium and carbon shells of core collapse supernovae, respectively [96], [91]; however, this mechanism is particularly uncertain depending strongly on the neutrino energy distribution. It is clear that another source is necessary to generate at least 6Li, 9Be, 10B and this is a non thermal mechanism, namely the break up of heavier species (CNO, mainly) by energetic collisions, also called spallation." http://cds.cern.ch/record/3933...

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/...

Did you hear anything about this research? If it promoted anthropogenic global climate change you would have.

It most certainly does not rule out dyson spheres. Any civilization advanced enough to build a dyson sphere would likely be able to build them in a way that we would have a hard time detecting them. I'm not saying aliens are responsible for dark matter, but it definitely isn't evidence against.

Besides, interaction with normal matter is the ONLY way that we identify dark matter. So says CERN.

Go to http://directory.web.cern.ch/d... Click on ATLAS and CMS, and find the directory of institutions. China is well represented on both. You may also scan the lists of 3000+ collaborators each, of course. China is also represented in detector collaborations at many other labs worldwide, including mine.

When I last checked the price for a ROXIE license from CERN was 2500 Euros, SC magnet design software incorporating all they learned about magnetics and mechanics.

I was involved in the SSC magnet project 25 years ago. Most of the difference between the SSC and LHC magnets is 4.5K planned operation of the former and 2K operation of the latter. Had LHC chosen to develop NbTiTa conductor they might have gotten another 15% in energy capability. This is old technology.

I spent two years working on Nb3Sn wire and tape magnets before my SSC work. At one point I hoped ITER would move along fast enough to push Nb3Sn magnet development for accelerators. Conductor yes, magnet technology not in time. Since China has great ceramic expertise, they may do better than Western metal-bashers.

I thought it was quantum chromodynamics mostly (the amount of energy holding quarks together is tremendous).

The "Hadron Masses" page on CERN's "The Particle Adventure" site agrees with you:

In general, only a small part of the mass of a hadron (such as a proton) is due to the quarks in it. Most of a hadron's mass comes from the kinetic and potential energy in the system. (Remember, E=mc^2; we perceive the energy in the system as mass)."

I thought it was quantum chromodynamics mostly (the amount of energy holding quarks together is tremendous).

The "Hadron Masses" page on CERN's "The Particle Adventure" site agrees with you:

In general, only a small part of the mass of a hadron (such as a proton) is due to the quarks in it. Most of a hadron's mass comes from the kinetic and potential energy in the system. (Remember, E=mc^2; we perceive the energy in the system as mass)."

This is not required.
https://security.web.cern.ch/s... is relevant.
This actually investigates the physics behind overwriting - in short - once is quite enough today.

There are concerns about reallocated space on hard disks - but 99.99% of the data has gone
away, and recovering the rest is at best expensive.

And it doesn't look like there will be a true SL7:

http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux...

Is it any wonder the internet came out of CERN?

If you're using C++ for scientific math, then you deserve to have whatever credentials you may possess to be revoked immediately.

Really? Well I'm guessing that's it for the entire field of particle physics then.

I have PoC code that I have used to prove that C++ can produce incorrect results based on factors other than the code itself, and at the level of significance as high as 10^-15. That is a completely unacceptable level of inaccuracy for scientific exploration.

...and yet we found the Higgs with such code...or do you think it was just a rounding error in ROOT?

Not to disappoint you, but I could tell you horror stories about my time working on the CMS team at Fermilab. Horrible, horrible stories.

Extremely poor planning, no accountability, a boss who was verbally and emotionally abusive to a co-worker (the reason I quit).

lack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social justice, which is cruelly absent today.

http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-contract-policy

science is trying to better understand the world, by making models predicting something. It isn't engineering.

I think you may have unintentionally identified our present scientific folly. Scientists are lost in engineering, and fantasizing. Everything but science.

It is exactly an engineering mindset that is needed to come up with a new theory. Why? Because engineering starts with a "what works?" mentality, then tries to define why it works, to quantify it and remove the uncertainty.

What works (i.e. is needed) today is (1) to discard relativity, field theories and the standard model due to their glaringly intractable failings (i.e. their bridges keep falling down), (2) start at the Planck scale (i.e. it should be empirically obvious that we need to start with the bottom level of the building) and (3) embrace the ether.

According to http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch...
"It is therefore a four quark state or a two-quark plus two-antiquark state."

Also check out the CERN line mode browser simulation of the first web site

On chrome it's unreadable, on IE it's crazily formated. Firefox shows it correctly, but come on; talking about how awesome the web is and giving an example that fucks up?

This is pretty much what the LHC does. If you look at the dipole magnet cross section [1], you see there are two beam pipes, with oposite magnetic field. Thus we actually have two rings in (mostly) one set of magnets, with counter-rotating beams. These beams are then focused and brought into collision at the four interaction points ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE.

If one uses particles of opposite charge, such as matter and antimatter (which was done for LEP, Sp\bar pS and TEVATRON), one can use the same magnets and beam pipes for bending in the ring, but you still need separate sets of magnets for focusing etc., and probably also separate set of RF cavities for acceleration.

[1] http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/components/magnets.htm

Well, many of these tunnels, including the one the LHC uses, have been refurbished multiple times already. Cern's main ring was built to be somewhat future-proof, but that was a long time ago. A google search came up with The history of CERN, which dates the groundbreaking to 1954.

In accelerators you have two basic designs: linear and circular(ish). In linear accelerators each boosting element (RF cavity or whatnot) gets one chance to give the beam particles a kick, so the energy is limited to how hard you kick (limited by technology) and how many elements / how long (limited by budget).

In circular accelerators you are limited by synchrotron radiation. At some point the energy pumped into the beam matches the energy lost via synchrotron radiation. To move in a circle you have to accelerate inwardly, and an accelerating charged particle radiates light. At particle accelerator energies, this radiation is in the x-ray spectrum. You can reduce the loss by using a larger ring -- a smaller curvature requires less centripetal acceleration and hence less radiation loss. You can also of course build stronger boosting elements, but the radiation also heats the beamline and surrounding superconducting magnets, so it's not "that simple."

The other thing to vary is the kind of particle accelerated. Electrons have a very small mass and lose a larger fraction of their momentum to synchrotron radiation. SLAC and KEK are linear accelerators that use electrons. (Cornell's CESR is a ring that accelerates electrons too, but at lower energies compared to these others.) Protons are the other obvious choice, which is what Fermilab and CERN's LHC (after the upgrade) are accelerating. Being much more massive, the protons slough off less of their momentum to synchrotron radiation and can be accelerated to higher energies given the same size ring. The disadvantage of protons is that the energy of the proton is shared among its three quarks (and gluons I think) whereas the electron is truly singular as far as can be told.

I've been out of touch lately but as of at least 8 years ago three proposals were being discussed: VLHC -- big ring accelerating protons. Next Linear Collider (NLC) -- long linear accelerator for electrons. Muon collider -- a smaller ring (actually with straight sections like a track&field track) that produces and accelerates muons. Muons are just like electrons only 200 times more massive and is unstable with a half-life of 2 microseconds. The muon collider was thought to be an ideal Higgs factory, but with a lot of design challenges. One of the main challenges is to not only accelerate the muons before they decay, but also collimate, or "cool", the beam very fast as well so that you can create as many head-on collisions as possible.

So the news that the VLHC design is currently in favor is interesting, but this is hardly the first time the issue has been discussed and I doubt it will be the last. Several years ago the NLC design seemed most favorable, but this would, by its length, be limited to a specific design energy and probably be built to produce Higgs, Higgs, and more Higgs. It seems to me like a VLHC would have more discovery potential for more massive Higgs particles, signs of supersymmetry, or whatever else might exist.

Hm.. Let's do some math here: LHC *total* beam energy is 362 MJ. Assume that with 100% efficiency ALL the beam energy is used to create micro black hole. It will be pretty small, with a weight of M=J/c^2 = 3.61 * 10^8/ (3 * 10^8)^2 = 4*10^-9 kg. It will not have much pull on the objects around it, so it'd need quite a bit of time to wander around to gobble up additional mass. Fortunately for us, in time t = 5120 * pi *G^2 / ( h * c^4) * M^3 = 3.4 * 10^-27 seconds the black hole will evaporate in a burst of Hawking radiation. Even if you "crank up" LHC to product a 1 kg black hole (you would need 250 million "current" LHCs to do it), the resulting black hole will live for about 8 * 10 ^ -17 seconds (that's 0.00008 picoseconds), before evaporating in a burst equivalent to a large thermonuclear explosion. So, I wouldn't bet on black hole experiments in the near future :-)

Hi, girlintraining.

I'm no troll. I was there (on the internet, not physically present) when Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web and I happened to notice while using Gopher. I downloaded and installed the first web browser and went to http://info.cern.ch/hypertext to see what was up with this new thing. I advocated and used PHP when the acronym stood for Personal Home Page. Back when everyone was banging out custom CGI scripts in Perl, it looked pretty cool. And for awhile it was. I rolled out quite a few sites based on PHP at the time. I've spent considerable time since regretting my early advocacy and plenty of time fixing PHP driven sites or migrating away from PHP to better platforms. Plenty of other people over the years have explained why PHP is a 'fractal of bad design', so I won't make that attempt here. I agree with them.

I calmly stand by my snark, perched atop the mountain of experience.

you have to give it the URL externally to proxy it. Kind of defeats the point, but does work: for ex: http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/proxy?url=http://a2dp4audi.com/ Swap my site address (I know, cheap plug), for any address, and it will work.

There are examples of maintaining a much much harder vacuum on this scale. All particle accelerators, including the LHC, are kept at a hard vacuum. The Large Hadron Collider is 27km long and 3.8 m wide, wider even than the proposed passenger + vehicle version of the Hyperloop. The large tunnel is kept at 10^-6 mbar (9.8 x 10^-10 atmospheres) for months at a time. The beam pipe is kept at "several orders of magnitude better vacuum."[Source [PDF]] The discussion of the beam pipe vacuum deals with how well the system removes individual hydrogen molecules.

So maintaining an industrial-scale vacuum is a solved problem, to much thinner vacuums than are necessary for Hyperloop. Mr. Musk's log scale plot of the effectiveness of vacuum pumps was intended to show where on that log scale the cost effectiveness of running pumps suddenly falls into a hole, to justify his choice of 0.001 atmospheres. I'm sure some effort and some experimentation would be useful to validate how many pumps set how far apart are needed to maintain the target vacuum, but the mathematical models definitely have exhaustive and detailed physical validation already.

Large scale linear electric motors also already exist and are already used in transportation. Tokyo's Toei Oedo Line is a subway that runs on linear electric motors. All together there are 11 subways in China and Japan running with linear electric motors. They run on wheels though, rather than air repulsion skids.

Both of your objections seem like solved problems to me. What I question is how well any system can be engineered to maintain tunnel smoothness well enough over time that the height of the tunnel floor never deviates by more than 0.5 mm along the length of the suspension skids over decades of operation. I don't know of any existing project that has maintained that degree of smoothness over such a distance. I suspect pylon design is critical to maintaining that smoothness, and the interior of the tunnel would have to be periodically resurfaced.

How do magnetic monopoles fit into this?

Magnetic monopoles could be the mechanism by which charge is quantized. Dirac showed in 1931 that if monopoles exist then charge, quite naturally becomes quantized through the fact that angular momentum is quantized. Unfortunately Dirac's mechanism puts no mass limits on real monopoles (i.e. not the condensed matter faked kind) but there is an experiment (MoEDAL) being run by a colleague of mine which is searching for evidence of monopole production at the LHC. However, if they exist, they could lie anywhere up to the planck scale which is about a quadrillion [10^15] times higher in energy than the LHC so it is probably unlikely that they will find them but if they do it would be an incredible discovery and it was a very cheap experiment to build (if you exclude the cost of the LHC itself!).

I'm curious, what does this mean for Grid Computing? I thought it was the principal solution for distributing the analysis of CERN data to participating institutions around the world.

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/computing/worldwide-lhc-computing-grid

a brief review of their documentation should shed some light. http://root.cern.ch/root/doc/RootDoc.html

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/computing
[...]
Approximately 600 million times per second, particles collide within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Each collision generates particles that often decay in complex ways into even more particles. Electronic circuits record the passage of each particle through a detector as a series of electronic signals, and send the data to the CERN Data Centre (DC) for digital reconstruction. The digitized summary is recorded as a "collision event". Physicists must sift through the 15 petabytes or so of data produced annually to determine if the collisions have thrown up any interesting physics.
[...]

Digital Equipment Corp had a fab and R&D facility not too far from where I live. (Side note: Anything under a few hours isn't too far away in Mainiac lingo.) Chances are that any networking equipment from DEC came from Augusta, Maine. Here's a newspaper article:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2209&dat=19761210&id=UaYrAAAAIBAJ&sjid=3_wFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6509,2109951

I never did a whole lot with them. I worked with some of the DEC Alpha systems, which were a 64 bit RISC ISA, I dimly recall them being quite sound and advanced for the day. The sad thing is I don't recall a damned thing specific about it... *sighs* I either burnt those braincells out or I've written new information over them. I should probably spend some time re-familiarizing myself with it just for old time's sake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha

I doubt that there are many in use today. A lady friend of mine was on the manufacturing line and I had a couple of friends in research. I'd be surprised if there were any of the systems still alive today but not too terribly surprised (if that makes sense) to find someone running one in their closet somewhere. Yeah, it would be surprising but not too surprising to find a small local bank or business that still has one churning out payroll or the likes.

Hmm... A quick Google (which is a verb I tells ya!) reveals this:

http://wwwasd.web.cern.ch/wwwasd/cgi-bin/listpawfaqs.pl/148

There also appears to be an AlphaLinux so, wow... I guess there probably are a few boxes left that still have life in them. I recall Compaq had some cloned Alpha boxes as well. I seem to recall some of their tech making it into a desktop but I'm going to stop searching before I get locked into a maze that takes me a few hours to negotiate and I'll post this now before it becomes a novella.

That's a different experiment. We're talking about the ALPHA experiment at the antiproton decelerator facility at CERN, which is separate from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer located on the ISS.

The question of whether anti-matter experiences anti-gravity goes back as far as I can personally remember (1970's) and probably some decades before that.

For most of the past 300 years in physics, experiment has led theory. We measure something, it leads to a theory, and then experiments are done to check the theory. Examples abound of theories that explain previous observations, and also predict something new - probably the most famous is relativity predicting the precession of Mars, but there are lots of others. (Newton predicting elliptical orbits based on the inverse square law of gravity comes to mind.)

Since about 1970 the situation is reversed - theory has led experiment. We have a satchel of theories which attempt to explain questions in physics which have no discriminatory evidence. Theories such as "Super Symmetry", "Loop Quantum Gravity", and "String Theory". I'm reading a book right now which claims 10^500 different string theories (yes, that's 10 with 500 zeroes after it), and lamenting the fact that few of these actually make testable predictions.

Relativity predicts that anti-matter should have positive gravity, but this has never been tested.

Until recently, the only antimatter we had access to has been charged particles: anti-protons and anti-electrons. Measuring the gravitational force on a charged particle is nigh impossible because the EM force is so large (relative to the gravitational force) that any EM effects swamp the readings. You can't just see if the particle falls in the container, because it's essentially impossible to shield a container well enough. It's like trying to measure the mass of a cork floating in a tornado.

Anti-hydrogen would work, but until recently we had none to test. Antiparticles tend to have high velocities when produced - they have to escape their anti-nemesis which is also produced - so they have to be slowed down enough to "pair" to make the neutral antimatter particle.

The vacuum used for the experiments has a big effect also. Depending on the level of vacuum used, any particle has a "mean free path" before it will impinge on another particle. You have to get your anti-particles to slow down, form antimatter, and conduct the experiment before another particle comes in and annihilates it. This requires insanely good vacuum which is both hard to achieve and highly expensive.

The ALPHA experiment at CERN now produces antimatter, so the referenced paper asks the question: what is the ratio "F" between the inertial mass and the gravitational mass of antihydrogen? For normal matter it's 1 and for "antigravity matter" it would be -1.

The paper reports that they have measurements within specific confidence levels that F < 110 almost certainly, and F < 75 at the 95% confidence level.

If the experiments outlined in the paper are continued (and perhaps refined), over time they can statistically narrow the results and ultimately settle the question by experiment.

I think that this would be a good thing, it would confirm (or contradict) by experiment something that is predicted by theory.

Here: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

No, Scientific Linux.

First the energy limit on interstellar travel is not getting out of the gravitational well of the sun it is getting up to a large fraction of the speed of light. If your intention was achieve that sort of velocity with a gravitational field then please try this is someone else's solar system because a gravitational field of that magnitude - think black hole - will do nasty things to planetary orbits.

Second Dark Matter is incredibly diffuse, far more so than normal matter because it only interacts via gravity and - possibly - the weak force. So there it no way to make small, dense concentrations of it like you can with normal matter.

Finally, the AMS results does not yet show any evidence for Dark Matter. They need to extend their energy by a few bins to see whether the spectrum starts to drop - the current spectrum could be explained by pulsars - the positron excess has been known to be there for some years already thanks to PAMELA and Fermi/Glast(for a slightly more technical announcement with plots see here). So it is a very interesting result but not yet evidence of Dark Matter. However, if it is Dark Matter, it should have a low enough mass to be created in the LHC so we may get a shot at finding whatever it is in 2015 when we turn back on with ~twice the energy. In fact my grad student and I worked on the ATLAS search for Dark Matter models associated with this type of positron-only signature but found no evidence. It's now being repeated with the 2012 data so stay tuned...

Interesting, list doesn't include APR, Science, Nature, or any of the science outlets.

Just the MSM, which all get their news from 1-2 sources.

Let's take a look:

APR: what's "APR"? Applied Physics Reviews? Applied Physics Research? The former African Physics Review, now the African Review of Physics?

Science: Higgs Boson Positively Identified

Nature: No story I could find specifically about the Higgs boson, just the "Seven days: 8–14 March 2013" column, which mentions it in an item ("The new particle discovered last year at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva continues to behave just like the Higgs boson predicted by the standard model of particle physics, according to results presented last week at a conference in La Thuile, Italy. The latest data indicate that the boson decays into leptons as predicted, and also dampen earlier hints that the boson decays into pairs of photons more often than the standard model allows. No evidence yet points to theories beyond the standard model, such as supersymmetry (see Nature 491, 505–506; 2012).")

and various science outlets:

Science News: nothing at present

LiveScience: Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is a Higgs Boson

Phys.org: Now confident: CERN physicists say new particle is Higgs boson (Update 3)

and some random organization called "CERN" or something such as that: New results indicate that new particle is a Higgs boson

So a list that does include Science, Nature, and some science outlets does have some articles and, not surprisingly, they largely don't have the "God particle" stuff in the headline.

Beryllium-7 decays naturally (to Lithium) by electron capture, but obviously Hydrogen doesn't, without some sort of push.

According to one of the presentations at the LENR symposium at CERN last year, the required energy deficit is on the order of 1.28 MeV, which in principle can be supplied by surface plasmons. The author states that observed neutron generation in lightning discharges and piezoelectric rock fracturing can be explained by this process.

Beryllium-7 decays naturally (to Lithium) by electron capture, but obviously Hydrogen doesn't, without some sort of push.

According to one of the presentations at the LENR symposium at CERN last year, the required energy deficit is on the order of 1.28 MeV, which in principle can be supplied by surface plasmons. The author states that observed neutron generation in lightning discharges and piezoelectric rock fracturing can be explained by this process.

There was a colloquium at CERN last year, see http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379

you will find the presentation about the Widom-Larsen-Srivastava that TFA talks about.

you will also find the slides about the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries transmutation experiment (and the Toyota replication of it) http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379

As mentioned above it was also presented at the American Nuclear Society's winter meeting in Nov 2012:

"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]." http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf

There was a colloquium at CERN last year, see http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379

you will find the presentation about the Widom-Larsen-Srivastava that TFA talks about.

you will also find the slides about the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries transmutation experiment (and the Toyota replication of it) http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379

As mentioned above it was also presented at the American Nuclear Society's winter meeting in Nov 2012:

"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]." http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf

At least for physics...

Solid state
Quantum espresso
Abinit
GPAW

Particle physics
The famous Geant4

Molecular dynamics
LAMMPS
Amber

etc... etc.. etc... I could post links all day.

I'm not really sure who this article is directed at, biologists I guess...

I think he was saying nobody (on the client side) actually uses it.

And it's pretty much true.
http://information-technology.web.cern.ch/services/fe/afs/howto/openafs-mobile-iphone-ipad-android-windows-phone

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries reported transmutation of Cs to Pr at low energies, it was presented at a CERN colloquium last year.

http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379

Toyota has replicated the experiment.

It was also presented at the American Nuclear Society's winter meeting in Nov 2012:

"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]."

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf

I am talking about a very different technology to produce the transmutations.

Mitsubishi made experiments which showed that Cs can be transmuted into Pr at low energies. The results were presented at a CERN colloquium last year http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379

Recenty Toyota (not Hitachi, my mistake) replicated the results, this was presented at the ANS winter meeting:

"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]."

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf

Just when they get a whiff of the Higgs they shut down. Curious.

Not curious at all. And, as mentioned in previous posts, the shutdown has been planned for several years already. If the Higgs' energy was higher than the roughly 125 GeV it seems to have, LHC would have found it a lot sooner.

The reason for not shutting down earlier was that they wanted to be sure that if it wasn't found by the time they shut down, then the accumulated data would be sufficient to rule out the Higgs. They calculated that in order to do that, they had to run until the end of 2012.

In fact, the current run at LHC was extended after the Higgs discovery was made, for the sole reason of gathering more Higgs data.

My experience is it would be better to provision a cluster of EC2 boxes to run the task than build a purpose-built super computer (with some exception). One disadvantage of clustered machines is longer communication latency, so tasks that require lots of process to process communication will run slower. Many problems can be tweaked with search spaces sliced so that this latency is not a big deal.

There are huge classes of problems were you can't tweak things like this. Basically any simulation where things are large distances interact or where there is a lot of communication can't really be shoved into a cluster. For example, computation fluid dynamics (e.g. anything looking at air or water moving over surfaces), weather simulations, molecular dynamics, simulating gravity, etc. All of these types of problems will run like crap if you try to use EC2 instances for them.

Also, have you really priced out what computation and data storage on EC2 costs? There's a few studies that show that EC2 on-demand instance will cost you 2-3 times more than purchasing a comparable server even with power, cooling, and maintenance/administration factored in. See, this or this for example. EC2 is great if you want to explore certain problems and need to temporarily scale up or want the ability to scale up on demand but if you have a base level of work that you'll be doing all the time, it's much more efficient to buy your own hardware. That is doubly true if your problems need any significant amount of storage space.

Or according to cern it doesnt require much to change the climate on earth, say for example enhance the greenhouse effect by creating more cloud cover.

See http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/CLOUD-en.html

Fun stuff, though not past the hypothetical and experimental stages.

There are great options above but ROOT is the one I use very often, http://root.cern.ch/ . It has all that I need to plot, fit, histogram, etc. It is interactive and you code in C++. Yes it has an C++ interpreter so your code can be interpreted as well as compiled. It also has python and ruby bindings.

It has EVERYTHING to do with SCADA.

http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/ica99/papers/mc1i01.pdf

See the paper above. In the first two pages it describes what SCADA is and what its architecture generally consists of. The most important statement is that while SCADA used to be based on other OSes, it is now primarily based on Windows though there is a Linux based SCADA vendor out there.

My rant points out that In addition to evolving from a single user OS, Windows brings along with it unprofessional coding standards both within the OS and within the applications. This is "very unpopular speech" here on Slashdot, but the reality is what it is. There is a LOT of shoddy Windows software out there and it's all due to the culture which was built around DOS/Windows.

Here is the paper: https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1493302/files/PAPER-2012-043.pdf

Some blogs discussing the significance of the result:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/lhcb_evidence_rare_decay_bs_dimuons-96311

http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/superstringy-compactifications.html#more

http://profmattstrassler.com/

Particle physics isn't my field, but neither the paper nor the blog posts seem to be interpreting it, as the BBC does, as evidence against supersymmetry.

Wow! The list of co-authors is almost as long as the article!

Here is the paper: https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1493302/files/PAPER-2012-043.pdf

Some blogs discussing the significance of the result:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/lhcb_evidence_rare_decay_bs_dimuons-96311

http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/superstringy-compactifications.html#more

http://profmattstrassler.com/

Particle physics isn't my field, but neither the paper nor the blog posts seem to be interpreting it, as the BBC does, as evidence against supersymmetry.

Exhibit A apparently the Earth's magnetic field traps anti-protons from the Sun. We just have to go collect them. If you can't be bothered to get up off your collective asses, well, you deserve to go extinct. Oh, and they're a renewable resource (at least for a few billion years) since they are constantly replenished from the Sun.


Exhibit B and Exhibit C -- harvest solar power, generate more antimatter. Yeah, kind of wasteful, but you fucking monkeys aren't fully utilizing Sol's bounty anyhow. I'm sure you'll figure out ways to improve efficiency with experience.


Honestly, you're all a bunch of lazy whiners, content to prey upon each other with arbitrage rather than applying yourself to actual productive work that would generate real wealth. The galaxy doesn't need the likes of you.

Two words: Bertlmann's socks.

So there are other sources of mass than the Higgs field?

Yes:

Without the Higgs field, quarks would have no mass and consequently the proton would be heavier than the neutron, since all their mass would come from their respective binding energies.

You say that when the strong nuclear force binds nucleons more tightly together, their mass falls. Couldn't that be an effect produced by the Higgs field though?

It's an effect produced by special relativity, as in "E = mc^2" - lose some energy when the 2 protons and 2 neutrons are bound together more tightly in a helium nucleus than in a proton plus a tritium nucleus, lose some mass. (Yes, I meant to say 1H3, not 1H2, in my previous post.)

The question is not whether or not it is possible but whether or not it is realistic and practical.

Not only is it realistic and practical but it is already in use for data analysis! Everyone on the ATLAS experiment at CERN uses python to some degree in their analysis and my grad students and I use an analysis framework almost entirely in Python with ROOT for I/O.